"Mama, what was my daddy like?" Josef asked Inga one day.

"He was a good man," Inga replied. "He was kind to everyone. He was a wonderful husband who loved me very much, as I loved him. He was quiet and gentle, and he loved beautiful things. He was a lot like your grandfather, who was a doctor."

"Why did he die?"

"He just got sick and died one day, Josef," Inga said sadly.

"And what about my Aunt Anna?"

"She got sick and had to be sent to a special place for sick people. But she just got sicker and died." Perhaps one day she would tell him the whole story about what had really happened to Anna, but he was too young to know about that now. Much too young.

"A hospital?"

"No, a sanitarium. It's a lot like a hospital though."

"And my grandma and grandpa?"

Inga sighed. "Some bad people took them away. Your grandpa was taken to a camp where he continued to work as a doctor until he got sick and couldn't work anymore. Then one day he...just died. Your grandma was sent to a different camp for women, where she died too."

"Why did she die, Mama? Did she get sick too?"

"No, she didn't." Josef, you ask too many questions, Inga wanted to say.

"The bad people who ran the camps, they...they didn't like Jews, so they killed a lot of them. Your grandma was one of the ones they killed."

"How did they kill them, Mama?"

"They were all put together in a big room with poisonous gas in it. They breathed the poisonous gas and it killed them." Inga knew that she couldn't hide the ugly truth from her son forever.

Josef looked very upset. "Just because they were Jews? People like us?"

"Yes, Josef." Inga herself had converted to Judaism shortly before her marriage to Rudy. It wasn't something he had insisted upon, but she had wanted to do it of her own accord.

"They were bad people, Josef. But they lost the war. The good people from the United States and the United Kingdom and some other countries closed their camps and took them all away to prison. They can't hurt us anymore, Josef. We're safe now."

"Really?"

"Yes, we are. We're in Israel, our permanent home, now. All the people here are our friends. All the bad people are gone now. Only the nice people are left."

Josef, seeming satisfied with her answer, ran off to play with his friends. Inga, who had wanted to be truthful with her son and yet spare him as much pain and worry as possible, hoped that he wouldn't have any bad dreams that night.